serenity and early summer

No, this isn't an ode to springtime in New Zealand. Instead, I will attempt to compare the last two movies I watched, Joss Whedon’s low-budget sci-fi blockbuster Serenity and Bakushu (Early Summer), Yasujiro Ozu’s star-studded meditation on marriage, and pick a winner. Separated by the Pacific Ocean, fifty-four years of television, and the entire career of Stanley Kubrick, is there any basis for comparison? Read on.

I’ve given both these movies 7 out of 10 stars on IMDb, but for different reasons. Serenity adds some sharp jokes and occasionally witty dialogue to the stale Star Wars formula. Bakushu adds a poetic fatalism and touching realism to the even older formula of family melodrama.

The key difference is pace. Serenity’s actors are in so much of a rush to get their lines out, I missed several of the jokes. Bakushu moves so slowly, I had time to look at the actor’s reactions before looking down to read the subtitles. The funny thing is that whereas Bakushu is a perfect setup for a sitcom, it’s Serenity that plays like one. Whedon’s punchlines have a distinct one-two, set-em-up-and-knock-em-down rhythm to them, which the meditative Ozu film does not. Ozu is no stranger to scatological humor, but, unlike Whedon, he does refrain from vibrator jokes.

There are similarities as well. While both betray their comparatively low budgets to the keen Hollywood observer - mainly through a paucity of elaborate sets - both directors display a high level of technical competence that comes from years of industry experience. Hand in hand with that experience goes a lack of imagination on the part of both directors. Serenity could just as easily have been the next Star Trek movie. Late Summer is easily confused with any of Ozu’s other great hits, all of which deal with the adaptation of traditional Japanese family to the alienated, fast-paced world of suburban life. Ultimately, both movies are forgettable.

But whereas Serenity would make an outstanding movie-of-the-week, Bakushu has the whiff of something like artistic integrity. Call it simplicity or clarity of purpose, but there is a resonance that comes from a near-allegorical treatment of the material. This is not an impossible achievement in the science fiction genre: one (don’t look at me!) could argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, or even The Matrix had some degree of clarity to it. Serenity, like all TV series, is a concept and a setup, rather than an artistic whole.

So, in the end, I will make the predictable call, and pick Bakushu.